It was impossible not to hear about AI in Cannes last week — not least because many of the major sponsors, including Microsoft, Amazon and Adobe to name just three have invested so heavily in the burgeoning tech.
However, while B&T had many conversations with staffers from every corner of advertising — including many who pointed out that there may be a tension between AI and the very notion of creativity itself — none were quite so un-fussed about its emergence as Cyril Louis, the global executive creative director of LePub APAC.
“The way AI will change everything is to raise the level of average,” he explained to us in the lobby of the Grey Albion Hotel.
“Once everyone has access to the same tools, we will arrive at a plateau where we will see a sea of the same work and we will have clients that will want to pay for more creativity.
“We are in a time when people who are far behind can catch up but we will plateau at one point, even if the tools are evolving rapidly.”
It’s a markedly different vision of our AI-powered future to many of the other voices that Cannes Lions attendees may have heard. Elon Musk told a baying Lumière Theatre that AI would stop us from working altogether. Meanwhile, companies including Google and Meta expressed their belief that AI would be the game-changing technology ready to liberate creatives from the mundanity of modern work.
If Louis sounds slightly worried about his competitor’s potential advances with AI, perhaps he has a right to. LePub as a whole performed very well at Cannes this year, picking up 26 Lions including one Grand Prix, six gold, 11 silver and eight bronze. The APAC team won a bronze in Outdoor for its “Laundromatch” campaign for Heineken.
In fact, LePub’s work for Heineken saw it garner the most awards among all alcohol brands during this year’s awards — six gold, eight silver, and eight bronze Lions. It also came second in the Festival’s Brand of the Year ranking.
LePub Amsterdam stole the show, however, with its “Refurbish” campaign for Philips taking home the Grand Prix in the Creative Business Transformation category.
There is, however, a strong connection across the LePub offices. The APAC team works closely with the team in Italy, for instance, and vice versa.
“LePub is work that lives in culture. That’s the type of work that you see. We’re not worried about the [local and global split],” Louis explained.
“We don’t look at it like that. We just find something. Sometimes we make shoes filled with beer [“Heinekicks” for Heineken], sometimes it’s a mobile phone that is a dumb phone [“The Boring Phone” again, for Heineken] or “Summer Puffer” [for Singaporean beer brand Tiger], which is a puffer jacket that makes people feel cool.
“It’s just about finding the right vehicle. We’re channel open rather than closed. Our proposition for APAC is to make global brands locally relevant, like Heineken. Then we make local brands like Tiger go global. Always having work rooted in culture makes it resonate with people rather than them wanting to ignore it, they crave it,” Louis added.
It’s a compelling vision of the creative end of adland — making ads that feel so unlike normal ads that consumers are captivated to the point that they cannot look away.
But with the award success, big-name clients and LePub’s growing import within the Publicis Groupe, why isn’t everyone adopting the “new agency model” pioneered by Louis and his colleagues?
Naturally, he explains, different clients have different needs.
“For us, Heinenken has to be in culture. It’s social. It’s beer. So they don’t have a very specific KPI that changes year-on-year. The way of working is about finding a space for brands to be in culture. Heineken is all about social barriers, what stops people coming together and then finding an intuitive way to solve the solution,” he said.
“It takes a lot of mining data and insights to be able to find something that is contextual — sometimes the context is global sometimes the context is local or micro.”
The nature of working for local and global brands rears its head again for Louis but provides another area where the global nature of the Publicis Groupe allows it to shine.
“The biggest thing we have is the network, not only LePub but Publicis as a whole. APAC. for example, is very different to Europe. In Europe, you have a unified way of thinking, even if we speak different languages. People have the same kind of beliefs but in APAC, it’s completely disparate. You have low-revenue countries or high-revenue countries, or countries with high revenues that grow so quickly but the mentality hasn’t changed as quickly as their standard of living.
“You [have to have] analysts paired with strategists in all these key markets that are our clients’ key markets. It’s also making sure that everything we do is relatable for all of the markets. It takes a lot more effort because you have to have a lot more alignment to produce APAC work to reach everyone. Then if there’s one market that is too important but too disparate from the others, they may require specific work.”
Perhaps that’s something that AI will never be able to do — reinterpret ideas to make an idea that speaks to someone in Singapore speak equally to someone in Shanghai or draw an insight from data about a problem that is as universal to someone in Melbourne as it is to someone in Manila. Perhaps, then, there’s hope for us all.
